Posted on July 13, 2010 - by jono
Sound Indicator
I am totally digging the sound menu that is shipping in the development branch of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat:
It feels well designed, implemented and sleek. Great work mpt and Conor!
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July 13, 2010
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Looks nice!
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July 13, 2010
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That’s really nice, bravo guys. If I could offer one piece of request it would be on the ellipsised text and that would be to allow it to scroll back and forth, or loop continuously in a similar vein to Winamp. Static ellipsised with letters either size looks less elegant.
Thanks for working on this though – it really is these little flourishes that make Ubuntu the OS of choice for so many.
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July 13, 2010
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Nice, but it can be improved. Don’t you find the margins a bit weird at the bottom (above and below the player buttons?)
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July 14, 2010
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Yes, there are many details still to be tidied up.
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July 13, 2010
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This looks like a good idea.
Is this work being done upstream or is it a ubuntu-only addition?
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July 13, 2010
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I hate rhythmbox, but I love the indicator; hope till 10.10 gets released that it will support coverart and track progress… and more players
A way to be able to go beyond 100% volume from there would be nice too.
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July 13, 2010
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Horizontal volume change bar == FAIL. Volume goes up and down, therefor so should the volume changer.
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July 13, 2010
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…not all physical and on-screen volume sliders go up and down. Just because we refer to it as “up” and “down” doesn’t (in my mind) mean it needs to match that. Furthermore, I would argue that left-to-right volume sliders, and the icons that indicate loudness will be pretty clear.
I am willing to bet not that many users will be confused by the slider.
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July 13, 2010
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As long as the scrollwheel works as expected, I don’t care whether it is horizontal or vertical. i.e. scroll up ? louder, scroll down ? decrease volume.
(I hate totem for seeking in the opposite direction than what I expect with mousewheel, amongst other reasons)
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July 13, 2010
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On my laptop, volume certainly goes from left to right. It’s marked out right there on the buttons above the keyboard. Same on my iPod. Same on the thing that pops up on my TV. My speakers, on the other hand, have a dial. Clockwise=louder. Maybe we should have a nice circular volume slider?
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July 13, 2010
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Why not using standard buttons instead of bitmaps for player controls?
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July 13, 2010
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It’s nice to merge audio applets, don’t get me wrong. I just want perfection!
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July 13, 2010
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Hello, The “Mute All” text seems to be a title for the other options. It’s not obvious that clicking the text label will mute or unmute the voice.
Change it to a checkbox or button.
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July 13, 2010
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Do we need sound preferences in there?
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July 13, 2010
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July 13, 2010
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I agree with truetom… But what I find most confusing is to put controls for totem in the sound volume panel? Shouldn’t the sound menu be about sound? It looks really out of place to me…
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July 13, 2010
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Can rhythmbox be replaced by a different media player in this indicator or is this concept made explicitly for rhythmbox?
The design and layout of the indicator is a bit awkward IMHO. It’s not obvious that you can click on “Mute All” and “Sound Preferences…” because they don’t look like buttons to me. The control buttons (prev, play/pause, next) are isolated from the rest and don’t really fit into the overall widget style. And the spacing is really weird as well.
The idea of integrating volume control and music player is nice though, perhaps this could be altered a little bit to show only the application(s) that actually play(s) sound when the user clicks on the indicator (like video players etc.). Dunno, I’d just find it confusing if I played a video in totem and clicked on the volume indicator and then being presented with information about rhythmbox.
Cheers, Jannis
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July 13, 2010
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Does it allow you to see what level (%age) your volume is at yet? I hate having to go into alsamixer to find out
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July 13, 2010
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Instead of having all that artwork and play/pause in the sound menu, maybe there could be some kind of linking between appindicators.
So we have the sound applet, with a list of applications playing sound and their per-application volume control. But where each application’s title (provided it has an appindicator) is a link which makes you jump to that application’s menu.
Not really sure if that’d be worth it, but I don’t particularly like the huge amount of space used and seeming lack of per-application volume control?
Unless the per-application control is being hidden unless there’s more than one app? Which I’d disagree with because you could easily have the app turned down and be wondering why max volume is suddenly so soft.
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July 13, 2010
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Sorry, but I do not like the design of the previous/pause/next controls. They look like from my $10 MP3 player stick. As if it wants to stamp in my face.
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July 13, 2010
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That looks quite ugly tbh, just add a couple more things and it will look like KDE… How would that work if you have multiple audio streams?
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July 13, 2010
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Hey ! Looks nice indeed, but what the point of putting player controls in a sound volume applet while player applet just next to it should allow to do the same work ? Imho putting only something like per-application volume control the same way it exists in PA preferences seems far more consistent.
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July 13, 2010
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You guys need to change the way the text is displayed. Why have a track listing at all if you have no clue what track is playing because the text is so severly shortened?
Other than that it looks amazing. I especially like the buttons. Well done! Now you only need to switch to Banshee and it would be perfect.
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July 13, 2010
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So now you don’t really need the rhythmbox indicator for anything right?
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July 13, 2010
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Nice, but… Since vertical space is not a real issue here, I think the cover should not next to the artist name and track title. The problem is visible in your screenshot, the artist name doesn’t fit.
The Play/Next/Previous button looks awkward and “alien”, not really integrated with the look of Ubuntu, but I guess that will change before the release of Maverick, just like what happened to the ubuntu-mono icons (that I really like) in the last cycle.
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July 13, 2010
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Will we have the option to display a sound indicator without all of the other stuff? I don’t want my music player to show up in my volume control, that’s what the music player indicator is for. So hopefully yall give it to us at least as an option to display what we want (and nothing more) in the sound indicator.
Having said that, this does look amazing and this last version of Ubuntu’s been the first one that I had no issues with. Good job!
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July 13, 2010
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why did you used this ugly gradient for the controls? it doesn’t fit together! I made a quick mockup!
mockup
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July 13, 2010
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I agree with True Tom. The idea is good, but graphically it’s all wrong, especially the album and track titles: a text should be readable and understandable, and that is definitely not understandable. Man, in the title I can read only the “The”. Sorry, but it feels poorly designed to me. They need a User Experience Advocate.
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July 13, 2010
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I like the idea but it looks very unfinished to me. For one, those pause/back/forward buttons look out of place with the rest of Ubuntu’s theme. The shading on them looks cheap; I think it would have looked nicer if they had gone with a simpler design, like a simple white silhouette of a pause/back/forward symbol.
I also agree with Corey that the horizontal volume changer == fail; it confuses me every time I use it in Lucid, and also, it’s weird the way that the album’s title is chopped up with dots in the middle. And then there are spacing issues with that huge amount of padding at the bottom.
Actually, the more that I think about it, I really do not like this sound menu.
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July 13, 2010
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I think the controls maybe could Be integrated nicer, but they sure look like some .png graphics so i’m gonna mess with them anyways. I’m a little astounded how few seem to have read the docs for the indicators,otherwise it would Be known that the UI Team is Smart enouh to figure out that duplicated applets make Little to no Sense and this won’t be reproduced until october.
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July 13, 2010
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It feels well designed, implemented and sleek.
I disagree, it feels hacked in. The idea is good though. This is a much nicer layout:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/24627/
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July 13, 2010
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Nice work, imho Mute All and Sound Preferences should be hidden. User can go in Control Panel to change the Sound setting if they like.
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July 13, 2010
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I find it really ugly that you try to merge everything in to as few indicators as possible. I have a 1440×900 and already a lot of space with the current setup.
Let me use my vertical space
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July 13, 2010
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Aside from the issue that others have already pointed out, it does look nice. But will it only work for users using pulseaudio? I have to disable pulse to get acceptable sound. I currently have no sound indicator in lucid as a result. The sound indicator in the notification area vanishes with PA and I have to add my own icon to launch a mixer.
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July 14, 2010
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Unfortunately Jono has oversold this a bit.
As many of you have pointed out, the menu obviously is not “well designed, implemented and sleek”, yet. It’s pre-beta software, and there are many things still to be tidied up. The spacing and alignment will be fixed. The appearance of the buttons will be fixed. The unhelpfully short title will be fixed. So, don’t panic.